


Two Halves of a Dead Man

by redsixwing



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: Eventual Comfort Fic, Gen, Post-Canon, Self Harm, Suicidal Tendencies, massive spoilers, nirai kujen is a warning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-05-24 14:04:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14956049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redsixwing/pseuds/redsixwing
Summary: When she went to see the captured thing claiming to be Jedao, Cheris didn't bring her gun.Canon divergence at end of Revenant Gun. Eventually, comfort fic. Cheris is a BAMF. Jedao needs a hug. Mikodez is better than he thinks he is.Canon-typical levels of violence, sexuality, and bad language may occur.Thanks to DreamsAtDusk for being a most excellent beta reader!





	1. Chapter 1

Cheris slammed the door, took three stomping steps across the hallway, and kicked the bulkhead hard enough that pain flashed up from foot to knee. Something in the parts of her mind she'd spent nine years labeling as not her own sat up and curled into memory: he'd done just that, once. Hard enough to break a toe even through his armor-tipped boot. Minutes had seen it repair the fracture, but human flesh was slower. He'd walked on the pain for weeks rather than see a medic, every step a reminder of-

 _He loathes himself,_ she thought, and another memory came hard on the heels of the first: she looked through ninefox eyes, seeing all around her anchor. A pretty, waifish manform leaned his palms on a console in Jedao's annoyingly casual manner, and drawled an insult to a Hafn commander. All around, his Kel shot him nervous glances, convinced he was going to get them killed this time. _But of course, that's what you wanted._

He'd provoked the Hafn into action, embarrassed their leader and wrecked their swarm, all the while wishing they would find a way to outsmart him this time.

Just as he'd provoked her. He couldn't have known she held his memories, could he? But she was Kel, visibly Kel if he could interpret body language at all, even if his imprint had smeared her standardized forms like a careless thumb over wet ink -

_Stop it._

She realized she was standing, staring at the wall while traffic passed behind her, only because a servitor's inquisitive lights flashed in the corner of her vision. Again?

"Are you all right?" the snakeform asked, and concern shaded its voice with orange. Cheris reached out and tapped the bulkhead to reply in Machine Universal: "Sorry. Kernel panic. I'm okay now."

She wasn't. The servitor discreetly shadowed her to her quarters, and she ignored it until she was past her door. Her gun, left behind at the last minute, lay on the table in jarring violation of Kel standards. She busied her hands by cleaning it. Some half-formed impulse had told her it was foolish to take a gun in where this new Jedao could get at it, even if he had to use her hands to do it, and Cheris had listened. Regret already tickled at her, but if he'd survived her previous shots, shooting the hawkfucker again wouldn't have done her any good anyway.

Ten minutes later, a message chimed. A direct call, to a number very few people were supposed to have.

"Mikodez." She took the call where she sat, the disassembled gun a mute rebuke to his timing. At least her hands had stopped shaking. At least the burn had faded from her cheeks.

"Good morning, Cheris. Or good evening, I suppose." The Shuos hexarch, tall and dark and well-dressed in red and gold, seemed to be sucking on a candy. If that was the sort of informality he wanted, she wasn't going to argue. "I hear you've acquired a pair of prisoners."

Straight to business, was it? She glared. "My compliments to your network. Protector-General Inesser is handling Kel Talaw; I suggest you contact her."

He tutted. "Don't play the fool, Cheris." Was that a potted plant behind him? "I'm interested in Jedao."

Only his memories, his habit of putting a calm mask on inner turmoil, prevented her from snarling at him. Stiffly, she replied, "He's my responsibility." She moved to end the call. Halfway through, he spoke and stopped her. "I can help you."

Jedao's memories whispered, _find out why._ Her hand hovered, moved in negation of the 'cut connection' gesture. "What makes you think you have anything I don't?"

"The calendrical spike." He raised a hand, and her view split into two panels. One showed him and the beautifully staged office behind him. The other showed a room Cheris had to assume was a lab, with a warmoth's worth of monitors and equipment wreathing a hulking, beetle-black cube. Where she expected indicator lights, there was nothing. A chill crept up her neck.

"My agents have known where Kujen's lab was for some time, and we started breaking his protections as soon as the _Revenant_ was lost." He said it smoothly, as if the butchermoth's disappearance were not a critical issue. "This is the black cradle. It's no longer operable in your regime, but we think we can get enough information from it to piece through what was done to you - and what was done to him."

Cheris cut the connection.

*

Mikodez shrugged at the blank air. "It's a start," he said to his potted orchid, and shifted to his next task. He had a report from those very same technicians to read, and a call to make to the his favorites among the Nirai.

The display that had shown him the black cradle shifted, and became a soothing view of an artistically perturbed nebula instead.

*

Fuming again, Cheris finished her cleaning and stowed her reassembled gun in its safe. Was there nothing she could do to rid her life of meddling foxes? The memory of Jedao's laugh irritated her further.

She forced her stride back to its usual length, yanked a mask of calm over her tensing features, and stomped out of her quarters, ignoring her sore toes. Dueling, perhaps; there were plenty of Kel in the capital city, and surely one of them would be interesting enough to get her mind off of Shuos problems.

Her feet took her to the infirmary instead, to a secure bay. Past the Kel guards, past the biosecurity seals with their minutes-eating routines, to Jedao's locked door. At her command, the displays lightened and showed him at the center of a nest of readings and calculations. Pitifully thin, his brow creased even in sleep, the infamous general still bore the face she sometimes expected to see in the mirror. She tried to choke a certain fellow-feeling and failed, even if he was a hawkfucker.

If he didn't remember Ruo's death or the trick with the lubricant, he might not remember Khiaz.

If he didn't remember Khiaz, what else didn't he remember?

*

It was longer than Mikodez expected before the call came in. Thirty-eight minutes: long enough to read the report and get the interest of the Nirai. Long enough to spend six minutes in contemplation of his new silver orchid over a cup of honeyed tea.

Cheris glared out of the screen at him. Something was familiar about the expression - ah. Recordings of Jedao had often shown him with a creased forehead; Cheris was doing exactly the same, down to the hooding of her eyes. "Good evening," he said again, smiling. It would irritate her, but there was going to be no avoiding that. If she was calling him, she'd made up her mind, and the least he could do was refraining from more obvious needling.

"Send coordinates. I'm bringing Jedao." Her dark stare challenged him to protest.

He sent the information and talked her through what she'd need on the approach, and as easily as that, the Immolation Fox was in his hands. It would be days at the speed of even the swiftest moth, with the drive irregularities that were becoming a fact of life, but that was only time to prepare.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kernel panic is a "blue screen of death" equivalent. Originating in the Unix/Linux operating system, I've seen it used as a metaphor for a total mental and emotional freeze, which is what Cheris means.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Waking up on an unfamiliar moth, Jedao is a ball of fear and anger. Hemiola is doing its best.

Cheris oversaw the loading of a borrowed moth. Her needlemoth was not just crashed, it was wrecked beyond belief - the last-minute flip that 1491625 pulled off had mostly saved the passenger compartment, but the rest of the little craft had been scattered across most of a kilometer, and even the nonliving components were savaged past repair. 1491625 itself had been damaged, and would recover after sufficient work. Rather than flowers, she'd sent it a vial of variable-coefficient lubricant and her wishes for speedy repairs. 

Mikodez had seen to the conversation with Inesser and Brezan, and how glad she was to have avoided the factional bickering. Hemiola... she thought, with some distress, that Hemiola had been aboard /Revenant,/ and was across the hexarchate by now, at best.

_Quit that,_ she chided herself. All she had to do was get Jedao to the Citadel of Eyes, get whatever information she could out of Mikodez, and then get away and... and what? 

Retire, maybe. Quit being Kel Cheris. Quit being Ajewen Cheris. She could use a break. 

A lower voice snickered in the back of her mind. Jedao's memories had been harder to silence since she'd failed to kill him, and harder still after capturing the moth-thing that wore his face. The ghost of the fox had lain quiet so long that she had nearly forgotten how snide he could be. She ignored it, knowing the sensation to be only a figment of her own mind. 

Servitor lights in polite green pulled at her attention. "Excuse me," said the snakeform she'd seen in the hallway. Identifying one servitor from another wasn't always easy, but Cheris had practice, and this particular snakeform had the sort of crisscrossing scratches on its exterior that spoke of a long time in vacuum outside the shields of a warmoth. With a dull ache, she thought again of Hemiola. "Will you need assistance on your trip?"

It was such a strange thing to ask, ignorant of her ongoing negotiation with Pyrehawk enclave, that she looked closer at the hovering shape. A long time in vacuum could create scarring like that - or a short period in space full of the aftermath of battle, with all its debris and dangers. She drew a sharp breath. "Hemiola?" 

"The same," the servitor said. "May I come aboard?" 

*

Cheris was giving it the sort of look that long-lost friends gave one another in dramas, except that she wasn't smiling. "Do you know where I'm going?" she tapped on her leg. Hemiola blinked back in cheerful blue. "No," it said. "But I saw the medical unit order go through the local grid, and you're packing more than your own food." It inclined a segment of its body at a case of ration bars. Not Cheris' favorite Kel feed, they were a popular and very sweet pudding flavor. 

Cheris now looked uncommonly like she'd eaten something she disliked, perhaps one of the pudding bars. "And here you are," Hemiola added, helpfully. 

"Get in," Cheris said. Hemiola floated obediently aboard, and Cheris followed.

"I'm sorry about this, Hemiola," Cheris said, and it whipped into a fearful coil facing her. Those were not good words to hear, ever. It halted in surprise to find Cheris neither reaching for it nor tuning a pulse spike: she had crouched down to speak to it face to face, and she reached out to tap her message on the its carapace rather than speaking aloud, even with the door closed to muffle her voice. Despite itself, Hemiola flinched at her touch. 

"I'm taking Jedao to the Citadel of Eyes, and I need to be very careful who knows about it." She looked grim and kept tapping, a little harder, enunciating very carefully. "Do you understand? I can't let you out of this moth. And he - he's not well. He's under sedation and he will be the whole way." 

Hemiola dimmed all its lights as it thought, then flashed them in a stubborn pattern. "What's going to happen to him when you get there?" The Citadel was infamous, not least in _Four Years Lucky,_ where the rules-abiding Kel lead was constantly getting pulled this way and that by attractive Shuos. (Good thing, it thought, it had downloaded more dramas upon arrival. It might not have another chance, and who knew if the Citadel would even let it on the grid before Cheris wanted to leave again.)

"Hexarch Mikodez wants something with him. I'm getting him there, and then I'm leaving." Cheris' face wobbled a little in a way Hemiola didn't recognize. "You can come with me," she tapped, almost a whisper. 

"I'm in," Hemiola flashed, modulating a bold pink it did not feel. 

It hid in the closet as Cheris left, and as a handful of close-mouthed Nirai set up what looked like a padded table, a set of spider restraints with full redundancy, and a system of tubes it didn't recognize. Technology had changed so much, it thought. 

Maybe not, it thought later, when they brought Jedao's limp form in and transferred him into the medical unit. Next to the elegant systems Kujen had built to work on him, this was practically barbaric. Trussed up like a moth in a web, Jedao looked very small.

*

Jedao wasn't sure how long he had spent in the dark. /Unconscious,/ he corrected himself. The distinction came from nowhere, and felt important, and just now it was almost all he could feel. 

Not quite all: his sense of mass told him there was something small and close, a servitor perhaps. A second, larger mass moved around beneath him, in a pattern recognizable as a Kel infantry drill. 

He couldn't open his eyes, and that was enough to jolt him with fear. Where-? 

The smaller, closer mass moved, and a spreading burn started somewhere by his chest, and he lost track of everything again. 

*

"Cheris," said the servitor. "How much longer to the Citadel of Eyes?" 

"Another thirty hours," she said, distracted. She'd been drilling, more from habit than any sense that she should. "Why?" This time she said it before the fox memories prompted her. 

"Jedao is down to twelve hours of sedative, and he's taking more every time he needs another dose." Hemiola made a melodic beep to emphasize the latter half of its statement, an emphatic Cheris had rarely heard. 

Cheris swore. "It's that body of his," she muttered. "They told me they'd figured out what he needed, and sent extra."

"What do you need?" Hemiola asked.

"Voidmoth harnessing sedative. Not something I can get more of in the next twelve hours." 

Hemiola flashed red in distress, and Cheris agreed.

*

His othersense was first, again. A small mass beside him, the larger one somewhere above him, quiescent. Something very large and very fast tugged at his senses and was gone. 

That yanked at him. Had some huge moth just done a flyby on - wherever he was? He tried to open his eyes and discovered that they were crusted shut. Tried to move a hand and simply couldn't - his forearm tensed, but his hand stayed still, restrained so thoroughly that a twitch of the fingers was all he could accomplish. Panic threatened. Jedao lay very still, assessing the situation. 

A low, tranquil chime had to be a heart monitor. Something else gurgled on occasion, and an anesthetic smell was sharp in the air. No light was visible through his eyelids - was it night in Cheris' calendar?

The smaller mass moved closer, and a familiar alto voice spoke. "Jedao? Are you awake?" 

His tongue was cottony in his mouth, and no sound was forthcoming. Tapping his fingers in Kel drum code, he replied, "I think so."

No breath of air came, though the voice relocated to be just beside his ear. That rewarded him with information: his captor was a servitor. The voice! He tapped, "Hemiola." 

"Here I am," it said. "Would you like to see Cheris?"

"I want to wash my face." Now that he was awake, he was becoming aware: he was sore with inaction. He was hungry, but that was dulled by the foul metallic taste in his mouth and the memory that eating wouldn't erase it. He seemed to have all his limbs, but if he hadn't gained a new scar or two, he'd be surprised. 

The small mass moved, and Jedao felt a damp cloth descend on his face. Some internal alarm shrilled and he stifled it - if Hemiola had wanted to hurt him, it could have done it while he was unconscious. It had not, and the cloth felt good, soft and warm and scented of something inoffensive, cleaning away who knew how many days' worth of sleep. He submitted and let it soothe him. 

After the cloth was taken away, he tried again to open his eyes, and this time was rewarded with the interrupted dark of a medical bay. A painting was displayed on the ivory ceiling above him, but the lights were too dim to make it out, and the grid wasn't responding to his prompts to brighten them.  

"You need water," Hemiola said from across the room. Tied tightly enough that he couldn't turn his head, Jedao replied, "yes."  
   
Presented in a bulb by a graceful arm of the apparatus that held him, the water tasted flat - he was definitely aboard a moth. That implied the biggest mass, briefly glimpsed, hadn't been in motion. Rather, the moth was flying fast. But to where? Worry began, a fluttering shadow on his thoughts.

_Hello?_ Jedao tried. Nothing replied. 

Fine. 

He moved in his restraints, testing. "Don't," Hemiola warned him. Jedao squirmed again. Tight bands of silky webbing held firm across his chest and hips, arms and thighs. Elbow to wrist, knee to ankle, his limbs were held in sleeves of the thin material. If he moved just right - 

The restraints flexed in response to his struggle, flattening him to the table. Something made a dissonant chime nearby. "You're all out of sedative," the servitor informed him. "I'm going to disable that system." That noise stopped, leaving only his heartbeat reflected in bells. 

That explained the fragments of his most recent memories - a burly Nirai holding him down with main strength, another preparing a solution they weren't sure would work. The burn of injection; thrashing hard against the spidersilk. Because of his body. Because of who he was inside it. Damn the heart monitor for its accelerating chime.  

"Do me a favor," Jedao rapped out, nails harsh on the support, "and disable the feeding system, too." Hemiola drifted closer, until the immobile architecture of its elegant head was in his field of vision, reflections of its own lights picking out a set of scratches he didn't remember. How long had he been out for it to pick up that much wear? Didn't servitor carapace repair itself?

"I won't do that," it said. Its voice was curiously even, even as its lights shaded from a pale blue that was probably intended to be comforting to angry orange. Angry with him? Slow, the snakeform lowered its snout until it was nearly touching him. He brazened through the desire to flinch, even though it didn't look like a threat posture. (He knew what those looked like now. Where had Hemiola been, when the servitors of the _Revenant_ had turned on the Kel?) 

Jedao worked his mouth and found that the water had helped. He spoke aloud, but the remaining dryness robbed him of volume. "Why?" he rasped.

"Because you need food right now," it said, and the simple sentiment was so out of place that he almost laughed. He choked on the motion instead and coughed dry pain, and Hemiola floated up and back, only to disappear from his view. 

"I'll trade you," Jedao offered. "Untie my hands, let me sit up, and I'll try to eat." 

Hemiola's mass shadow dipped sideways as it gestured with its body, somewhere out of sight. "I'll go get Cheris," it said. 

Jedao closed his eyes and lost track of time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even Hemiola expects abuse, poor thing. 
> 
> Pulse spike: a device capable of emitting a strong electromagnetic pulse, and incapacitating a servitor. Not canon, but I didn't find anything that served the same role and they'd almost have to exist.
> 
> I could have sworn they'd arrive at the Citadel at the end of this one, but more scenes happened. There will be more comfort next chapter if I have to use a shoehorn.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cheris begins the interrogation of her prisoner, only to discover that she needs to change tack if she's going to get anywhere at all. 
> 
> The inside of Jedao's head is a serious mess. 

 

Dreams: lantern eyes glared from the backs of jeng-zai cards. So many decks, scattered all together. No matter how many she picked up, the faces always showed the Deuce of Gears.   
   
"Cheris," said Hemiola. "He's awake."  
   
She woke completely at just that, Kel habits augmented by Jedao's training. Refusing to look at the clock, she rolled out of her bunk, bare feet soundless. Dressed, in the dull jacket and trousers that were nearly a uniform, any more. Checked that her gun was in its safe. If she brought Mikodez a corpse, he was going to invent something nasty just for her.   
   
It was several minutes later that the servitor led her into the room with the medical unit. Jedao lay restrained, eyes closed, face drawn and tight even in sleep. As the lights rose with her presence, his eyelids flickered and opened.   
   
Unsought, memory intruded: how many anchors had lain just so and woken to find themselves no longer alone in their bodies? Seen from above, a boy with curly yellow hair and delicate features. A beautiful youth with startling grey eyes. Disconcertingly, her own body, smaller but stronger than the others. This Jedao, she reminded herself, was no revenant; if he were, he'd have shared Kujen's fate.

Maybe he intended to do just that, but he was now made of sturdier stuff. Cheris found she suddenly had no idea what to say. "You're awake," she accused him. 

"Hello, memory vampire." His voice was a papery rasp. Two steps took Cheris to his bedside, and she whisked the water bulb out of the medical unit's gripping tendril and offered it to him. He drank - he gave her a suspicious look, but he drank, and coughed. 

"Do you know why I have your memories?" she asked. It wasn't where she'd planned to start, but Jedao was nearly the manipulator Kujen was, and she couldn't assume this version of him was any less skilled. _Get him talking,_ she thought. _About anything at all. See where it goes._ The water bulb was empty; she handed it to silent Hemiola for filling. 

He drank again, and when he spoke, his voice was clearer. "All I heard is you attacked me and took them." His dark eyes flashed - anger, fear? She couldn't read it through her own rising emotions. In the recesses of her mind, the fox stirred, whispered _careful_ , but Jedao wasn't done yet. "Kujen said you were my worst match. That you might be more me than I am."

"Maybe I am," she agreed. He was studying her, but something was wrong - where she expected a shrewd, canny gaze, she saw helplessness. Where she expected defiance, there was an almost youthful openness, and that... was not the Jedao she knew. Nor was it the utter servility of active formation instinct. Her calendar should have precluded that, but it also should have precluded revenants. Her fox memories and Kujen's continued existence spoke to a failure there. 

"Tell me what you do remember," she ordered. In a tone more like conversation, added: "I'll trade you - stories for stories." She could come up with some of the less hazardous material; she'd spent nine years sorting it into place, and maybe it would jog the fragments of his memory into cohesion.

*

That was an order, no matter how she couched it, and Jedao trusted Cheris' offer as much as he'd come to trust Kujen's machinations. How she saw him, how they all saw him, had to be partially at fault - if he looked like he felt, it might have been easier to get her sympathy, and if he had even a single other person on his side...  

Hemiola was close to being an ally. The servitor offered him water, and he forced himself to swallow it, but he would never again assume a servitor to have his best interests in mind. And nobody was going to believe the eyes of a frightened cadet when they were set in the battle-scarred face of the Kel's most infamous weapon.

He was tempted to ask: if he cooperated, would she untie him? At least one hand. And maybe let him sit up. Such a request, had Kujen heard it, would likely have resulted in being tied even tighter. He swallowed the desire and recited what she wanted.

"I was a Shuos cadet. First year. My best friend was Ruo, and we were thinking of designing a game together. The Shuos heptarch was Khiaz." Kujen had reacted to that - obliquely, uselessly, but reacted. And Cheris had thrown the name at him earlier, as if he should know it from more than a civics class. Now she reacted again, her back stiffening and her thin lips compressing into a flat line. 

"Before that," she said. Her voice was soft, almost hoarse, and Jedao wasn't sure how to interpret that. Was she going to shout at him again? Reach for the pistol she'd apparently forgotten the first time? He could still see the ivory fingers close on empty air, before she'd stormed out. This time, though, her hands stayed still, white-knuckled on her knees. 

"I...was accepted into Shuos Academy..." A happy memory, at last! He'd been relieved and worried all at once, standing in line with the rest of the newly red-uniformed kits as they received the congratulations they had earned. "...Heptarch Khiaz delivered a speech on gamesmanship, intelligence, and service, and that's all I saw of her." That certainly couldn't be what Cheris cared about. What was she fishing for? And why wasn't she relaxing?

"Before that," Cheris grated. 

Jedao groped after memory that had to be there. He hadn't leapt fully formed from the steps of Shuos Academy, had he? "I can't remember," he croaked. 

Cheris stood abruptly and made a pretense of checking some piece of equipment. She was losing patience with him.  "How old are you?" she demanded.

"Seventee-" Shit. What had Kujen said? His body was forty-four and a veteran of Kel service? But it was too late; the memory vampire Kel assassin, that apparently being a thing the Kel did at some point in the last four hundred and some years, was looming over him in utter outrage, fists clenched and teeth bared, and he couldn't do more than close his eyes to defend himself. Jedao refused to do even that. 

*

The infamous general who'd very nearly recreated the slaughter of Hellspin Fortress on her allies was-  
The Immolation Fox renewed in Kujen's service and come for her specifically was -   
Jedao was a child of seventeen.

Cheris' ears were ringing with the last word Jedao had spoken. Fury dusted her vision like ash or static. That had been too fast to be a lie, and he'd cut off halfway through like he thought he was going to hide something from her. As if. She remembered seventeen, remembered pranks played at Shuos Academy and Ruo's smile and some really, really bad decisions.

She sat down hard. The traitor fellow-feeling she'd already harbored was suddenly ascendant, and howling for revenge. "Seventeen," she repeated, in a voice devoid of tone. "Then - no, you couldn't have known." She perched her elbows on her knees and buried her face in her hands, peripherally aware of Hemiola's lights flickering too fast for her to read. Couldn't have known. Couldn't even have defended himself, for all the skills he'd learned in later life were absent. 

Between her fingers, the lights flashed again, bright and urgent. "Cheris. Cheris, please say something." She looked up to find Jedao staring at her with an entirely incongruent expression, mulish stubbornness that she well remembered, open fear that her version of Jedao had not permitted himself - or her, when she'd been his anchor - to show. 

"Okay, new plan." Her voice surprised her with its gentleness. "I don't need to know what you remember of Shuos Academy." Khiaz had been after his graduation, years after. "I do need some other things-" she choked on _hawkfucker_ and tried a different tack - "like what exactly happened on the _Revenant._ But that can wait."   
   
He was still looking at her like that, the incongruous mixture of childlike vulnerability and weathered face. "We're going to get to the bottom of this," she told him, with the same firm gentleness she'd once used to direct Kel recruits. Only by focus did she keep herself from calling him fledge - it wasn't exactly an endearment in the best of times, and he wasn't Kel anyway. Jedao without the Kel! Almost all of his memories involved them, and it was a strange thing to contemplate.

"Okay," he said. Just that, and in a weaker voice. Hemiola offered him water, but he didn't take it.

"You need to know some things," Cheris began. She smoothed her face into neutral lines and drew a deep breath. 

"Can I sit up first?" Jedao sounded plaintive, and Cheris caught the immediate suspicion that it was an attempt at manipulation. _Seventeen,_ she reminded herself. He hadn't even been full Shuos at the time. That didn't mean he wasn't a threat - he was, transparently, dangerous - but between his physical condition, her confidence in her own abilities, and the way things were suddenly snapping into place when she thought about him missing everything he'd done as an adult, she nodded sharp agreement.

"Yeah, you can." 

*

She hadn't attacked him, after all. Jedao was losing certainty that he understood Cheris at all - he'd managed to provoke her a time or two, but right now, cooperation seemed much more in his interest. (If he wanted to act in his own interest. He wasn't yet sure.) And Hemiola.. the servitor, difficult to read as all its kind were, posed another sort of challenge entirely. Would this new Shuos hexarch be worth confiding in? A prickle ran down his spine at the thought.

Hemiola assisted in moving the medical unit's various tendrils and Cheris authorized the restraints' partial release. Jedao sighed in relief as the silk retracted from over his forearms, and loosened on his upper body. It still extended across his upper chest and over his shoulders, tightly enough that he wouldn't be able to slip an arm free without dislocating something: even a half-trained Shuos could be expected to slip restraints that didn't extend above the waist. The servitor found and disabled the heart monitor's monotonous chime, switching it to a visual signal instead. 

Jedao's hands were pale and cold, but it was a pleasure to be able to move them as he wished. Hemiola found a blanket, and it was Cheris who tucked it around his shoulders. The soft, fuzzy material inflated itself on sensing his chill, and warm air gathered immediately. The table let him half sit, half lean, as the head section angled itself upward. He raised his arms to horizontal, slow and careful, and rolled his wrists. "Thank you," he said with feeling, and arched just enough to stretch his back before the restraint pulled him back in. 

"You ready?" he heard, distant, but clear, as he closed his eyes.

"Sure," he said blearily, and fell asleep. 

*

Hemiola turned all its sensors on Cheris. Shaking hands made a pleasing rippling rhythm, but it didn't think she would want to know that. Maybe later. "He's asleep," it said, perhaps unnecessarily. She could read the displays, but she wasn't looking at them. Maybe her augment was providing her the information instead.

Cheris blew out a breath and scrubbed a hand over her face, fingers tapping Machine Universal as they went. "Thanks for waking me." 

"Are you all right?" It seemed like the right thing to ask, even if Hemiola hadn't known what to do in the moment she'd reacted so strongly. 

Cheris looked up over her hand with glassy eyes. "No," she said. 

"What do you need?" It had done this with the hexarch, when he was in a state. Cheris, from the look of her, was in a state. "A drink? A drama?" It couldn't order her a courtesan or even get on the grid for a new study, those being two of Kujen's favored methods of coping, but it thought she might prefer something else, anyway. 

"Bed," Cheris said, kindly enough. "But thank you." 

After she was asleep, Hemiola moved about on its cleaning rounds. It couldn't help but notice that she'd left just one candlevine glowing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to DreamsAtDusk for the excellent suggestion of Jedao blurting his age, and Cheris believing him! This chapter wouldn't have worked as well without that.
> 
> Cheris isn't familiar with the mechanics of the black cradle, so she isn't aware that Kujen (and Jedao) could have persisted in being revenants even in hostile calendrical terrain. She's also not familiar with the math behind carrion glass, or she probably could have rid herself of Jedao's memories entirely. 
> 
> ...It's going to be a very good thing that she did not.
> 
> Waking up from sedation is a weird experience, and Jedao's got the added complication that what they used isn't quite right for his metabolism. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cheris tries to get Jedao to eat.  
> After arrival at the Citadel of Eyes, conversation begins with Mikodez.

Cheris checked in on Jedao after she woke up. He was still sleeping, the table reclined a little from its seated position. With his head turned into the cradling pillow and one hand thrown over the webbing on his chest, he looked almost peaceful. The displays indicated he was as well as could be expected, save for one. 

-Low nutrient,- it said. A column of numbers below that probably indicated something was amiss, but Cheris lacked the context to interpret them. She looked at Jedao's bony arms, and remembered a powerful body with long reach and greased-lightning reflexes, and frowned. Nothing looked life-threatening, she hoped. Wouldn't they make a nice obvious alert for that?

Hemiola uncurled from its corner, extending its long body toward her. "Good morning," it blinked. "I will find you when he wakes."

"Thanks," Cheris replied. When she went for her own ration bar, she found a pair of the pudding-flavored bars too, and left them perched on the medical unit. Hemiola was still in there, outwardly inert. Playing its favorite dramas again? Its posture was unreadable. She didn't bother it.

Cheris wanted a drama of her own, or company, or anything but the long wait between her and arrival. She took herself to the pilot's station, and dropped a portion of the day into the mundane necessity of arranging her approach to the Citadel. If Jedao had been appropriately sedated, she would have felt better about starting a drill or finding something to watch, but his waking had thrown everything into shambles. What could she do, that she could put down when Hemiola inevitably came looking?

What had she done on the needlemoth, not so long ago? What had she done with 1491625 for company, or when she'd needed to keep an eye on the slow boil of dislike between it and Hemiola? She'd drilled, and planned, and contacted Brezan and Inesser and more people than that about all the million things that had to be done to keep Kujen's swarm from destroying them all. 

Now, there wasn't a need for any of that. Brezan was trying to lead a government and Inesser to protect it. Cheris didn't have to be Kel. She didn't have to be a soldier at all. All she had to do was make it through this transit, get Jedao off of her moth, and then she could make up her mind about what was next. 

The pending decision felt like the void the moth traversed, just waiting to swallow her. Like null gravity, where any wrong move could send one tumbling forever. She reached for Jedao's memories, but he'd had no expectation the war would ever end. Cheris wiped a hand across her eyes, and checked the time - ten hours left - and decided she could hold out that long. 

Hemiola found her with just two hours left before docking should begin. Instead of speaking her name, it made a delicate chime. 

Cheris turned, dreading bad news and red lights, but Hemiola's indicators were shifting around an anxious sort of yellow. "He's awake," it said. "But the med unit keeps pinging, and I can't get it to stop." 

"All right," Cheris said, in her best attempt at a comforting tone. "Let's go see what he needs." 

*

"I'll see you soon, Cheris." Some would have interpreted that as a threat, no matter how banal the tone. Mikodez looked to his new assistant, standing just outside the pickup's range. Nirai Orwa was one of the very few people who both had the necessary skills to understand some of Kujen's notes, and had agreed to work under the conditions Mikodez required, including the most stringent security in the Citadel and the possibility of a full mind-wipe.

Now, she stood with her hands behind her back, very still. She spoke in a deliberate voice. "If he's woken, and he responded so badly to sedation in the first place, you can't sedate him again so soon. Not without maybe killing him."

Mikodez made a moue and reached for a cookie. "Not even with exotics?"

"Your exotics work on humans." Orwa met his eyes and shrugged. "Not moth-derived forms."

"The backup plan it is."

*

Something was making an insistent sort of chime. Jedao could raise his head now, and his arms too - right. He'd been partially untied. He picked up a heavy hand to rub the muck from his eyes and looked around. How long had he been asleep this time? 

Hemiola perked up and blinked in the familiar drum code. "Are you okay?" 

Without thinking, he clicked back in the same patterns. "As far as can be expected." His stomach hurt, and there was an uneasy gnawing sensation to the pain, but that was a small thing. Otherwise, his arms didn't hurt, his neck didn't hurt, and his mind felt relatively clear, the last of the blurry sedated feeling swept away by true sleep, as much as he needed. He was still weak, terribly so; even lifting his head was an effort. Best to bide his time. Cooperate, if he could stand it. 

It was better than being shot again. His knees had finally stopped hurting, but Cheris had incredible aim. 

He made the effort and took a drink before trying to speak aloud, and when he did, his voice was clearer than he remembered. "Where's Cheris? She left her ration bars behind." He picked one up and eyed the packaging. Unfamiliar names, familiar text: some things never changed. He'd once used Kel ration bars to prank another student, swapping the dry, unpleasant contents into the packet for her favorite chewy sesame candy and steaming it closed again. This particular unit claimed, optimistically, to be pudding flavored. Jedao had his doubts. 

"I'll be right back," Hemiola blinked, and hovered out into the hallway. Its movement raised the lights, and Jedao laid back, studying the newly visible painting. Colorful and cheery, it depicted lions romping among blooming branches, a shadowy cave barely visible behind the larger of the two. The artist had done a fine job of avoiding faction colors: orange and pink and yellow and brown predominated. Even the lions' manes were a deep, saturated brown instead of black, and the ground was left to the plain ivory that imitated the materials of ancient artists. He spent several minutes puzzling over it, but it would be a long stretch of time before he understood why Cheris had chosen that particular scene.

A tap at the doorframe alerted him to company: Cheris, without Hemiola. The servitor presumably had other things to do than watch him all day. 

"You could eat that," Cheris said, and there was something familiar about her smile. He raised the ration bar to eye level, making a show of examining it. "I could," he replied. "But I might feel worse for trying. Hawk's food isn't kind to sparrows." 

Was that a Kel joke? Where the hell had that come from? Cheris didn't quite laugh, but she snorted. "Sure, but foxes eat everything." 

The medical unit interjected a loud triple chime, flashing one of the numbers below "nutrient low" on the display. Cheris took two rapid steps and leaned over him to examine it. "You need to eat something," she said. "Might as well be that. Besides, it's a popular flavor. Everyone loves the pudding bar." She sounded rather dubious of it, herself.  

"Sure. Do you like it?" Jedao needled. The look she gave him said eloquently that she did not. "I traded mine for the honey sesame flavor." 

Talaw had hated those ones. (Dhanneth had-) Something felt tight in his chest, and Jedao focused hard on Cheris and the small type proclaiming his ration bar to be nutritionally complete and suitable for all required activities. _Every spark needs fuel!_ it proclaimed.

"I'm not hungry," Jedao lied. The med unit chose that moment for an accusing chime. Cheris gave him a long, flat look that expected confession, and when he didn't comply, jabbed an accusatory finger at the display. Ranks of numbers, highlighted amber, described some chemistry he didn't understand. "The med unit disagrees," she said.

Deliberately slow, he unwrapped the bar. The innocuous scent was something like egg custard (where, and when, had he eaten such a thing? Kujen disdained anything so common), with a distinct whiff of the ration-bar flavor that pervaded every example of its kind. Cautious, he nibbled it.

The sweetness almost managed to drown the bitter-metallic taste that accompanied every morsel of food, any more. Then it made it worse. Jedao forced himself to swallow, aware of Cheris' attention on him the way he was aware of the remaining restraints. 

"Good," she said. 

He gave her a pained look. "Really, people eat these?"

"It doesn't even kill them," she said. The brief amusement faded from her face, and her next words bore the tone of an order. "Try to eat it. You get through all of that, and we'll be there soon." 

As if his eating would change anything? Jedao wasn't going to be walking into the Citadel of Eyes anyway, he suspected. Hemiola had said there was no sedative left, but he was still restrained. Under her watchful eyes, he managed to down most of the bar; when he rewrapped the end of it for later, she nodded and left. There was no point to complaining, and if he went into hibernation as _Revenant_ had warned, he would be even less able to control his situation than he was now. 

Control for what purpose? he asked himself, but he got no answer before the approach chime sounded. 

*

"You look like hell." Mikodez walked along beside Cheris and Jedao's medical unit, under the careful control of Hemiola. 

"Thanks," Cheris said, dry. She did: there were dark smudges under her eyes, and Mikodez noted a certain unevenness to her gait. He had no such difficulty, but he hadn't spent four days cooped up on a small moth with an uncooperative Jedao.

Was there any other kind? From what they'd recovered of Kujen's notes, he thought not. 

"I've set up apartments for both of you," he said, brisk voice underlining the concern he wove into his expression. "You'll have the benefit of good security, and if you want anything  - food, furnishings, courtesans, hobby materials - you have only to ask. Meals will be provided, and there's a private garden between your residences for your pleasure." 

"In other words," Cheris drawled, "we're under house arrest." Despite her even tone, the way she tensed - subtle, but Mikodez knew exactly what he was looking for - said that she was entirely ready to take her freedom in any way she had to.

He had no desire to fight the notorious assassin, especially not over such a minor matter. "Please, see me before you do - but you can leave whenever you want." There was a subtle emphasis on the pronoun. 

Jedao caught it, and his too-thin face took a mulish expression. "What about me?" he challenged. 

Interesting. He'd lost some subtlety, but the haunted lines of his face put Mikodez in mind of another reunion, another shattered boy. The hexarch put on a gentle smile. "Let's discuss in private, shall we? But recover, first. You certainly won't be leaving the Citadel in a medical unit."

The way between the docks and the new apartments was short and private, variable layout permitting such niceties while keeping his security teams invisibly close. The new snakeform servitor left after Jedao's medical unit was placed, and Mikodez spotted it later, flashing elaborate patterns of lights with one of the more usual foxforms. Cheris went to bed without so much as bidding him a good evening, and Jedao had promptly fallen asleep again. 

No doubt they were exhausted, but Mikodez had no time to spare. Before he passed the security perimeter around them, he straightened his spine, polished his stride to reflect insouciant cheer, and went to see what else Orwa needed.

*

Jedao woke in the middle of the Citadel's night because someone was in the room. A short, soft-looking womanform worked on his medical unit under Hemiola's watchful guard. Nirai silver flashed on her shoulders, with the fall of her hair to provide the contrasting black. "Don't mind me," she said. "Just refilling your nutrients." She had a hatch open, and was feeding a series of powder-filled vials into the machine even as her other hand tapped commands on a terminal.

She frowned, tapped faster, and exited the room.

Jedao muttered something about Nirai and untrustworthy machines and passed out again. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jedao's painting is a reference to the lion dance, which often begins with the lions awaking from hibernation and emerging from a cave to play and hunt. The unavoidably political history of lion dancing means it's probably heretical in the old regime, so Cheris is making an intentional political statement. Unfortunately, Jedao has lost enough context to miss its significance.  
> 
> Thanks to DreamsAtDusk for beta reading and comments!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cheris and Mikodez consult.  
> Mikodez and Nirai Orwa learn a thing about Jedao's new body.

Jedao's memories provided nothing of Mikodez. Cheris remembered him herself, from when she'd served as Jedao's anchor and from later, when she'd used his name and banner for her own, but it was always a little uncomfortable when the reflexive check in the other half of her mind turned up nothing at all.   
   
Well, almost nothing. She had the distinct impression that Jedao had found the hexarch attractive, tinting a snappish conversation with him in a whole new light. She put that memory back where she'd found it with a sigh.  
   
Getting an audience was neither as easy as Mikodez had implied, nor as difficult as she'd feared. His aide, an older alt, gave her a suspicious, narrow-eyed look. Shuos Zehun's name was legendary among a certain set; Cheris found them less than frightening. But Cheris had faced down Inesser and Kujen and Jedao with nothing but a mind full of someone else's memories, and was willing to admit that her perspective might have been skewed.  
   
She was permitted to meet Mikodez in his office, or a room made up identically to it. A silver orchid had taken the place of the other, less charismatic, houseplant.   
   
"Shuos-zho." The ancient honorific came too easily to her tongue.   
   
"Don't call me that, Cheris." Mikodez took something puffy and yellow from a dish, offered it to her. She took one, and found it to be a marshmallow flavored with some sort of citrus, both too sweet and too sour for her taste.  
   
"What have you learned about Jedao?" Any discomfort with her use of Jedao's mannerisms failed to slow him asking awkward questions, but this was what she'd come to do. Nothing for it. She studied him, wishing she still had Jedao's acumen at reading Shuos faces. "He's seventeen," she said, deliberately blunt.   
   
The hexarch paused with his hand in the marshmallow dish and powdered sugar on his lips, and Cheris could have sworn she saw sadness in his dark eyes.  
   
"Do you know," the hexarch said, after a moment. "That makes a certain amount of sense." He smiled, as if the comment were self-explanatory. "If that's the case, he's missing an awful lot of memory." A moment passed in silence; she refused the bait.   
   
"I suspect you have those memories." The moment gone, Mikodez was back to his annoyingly chipper self. He smiled, an astonishingly bright crescent for how much sugar he ate. "And he has the context you lack for understanding what you have. Elegant, no?"   
   
Elegant for a torturer. Cheris was about to say so when the door whispered open, and Cheris whipped around to face it. Jedao, of course, wasn't there. A short womanform in Nirai colors, her tan skin somewhere between Cheris and Mikodez' extremes, dropped into a deep bow. (Cheris' eyes flicked to her lapel, but her battered jacket of course bore no insignia; certainly not the talon and eye to merit such a gesture.)   
   
"Cheris, meet Nirai Orwa. She's going to be helping you with that." 

 _Ask why,_ said the fox, but she heard herself say, "What do you mean?"  
   
*  
   
Jedao woke to brief intervals of the Nirai muttering over his medical unit, or of Hemiola's silent, watchful presence. All the while, his othersense informed him of moving masses: people, servitors, the slow, turning bulk of the Citadel itself. Aboard a moth, it had been easy to think the universe empty. Here, even half awake, that sense swarmed with activity.  
   
Perversely, he tried to ignore it, but it only pulled him more toward wakefulness. A thread of hope emerged: he felt less like an empty wrapper to be crumpled up and tossed aside, and more like himself. His stomach jangled hunger and went to war with the viciously sharp metallic taste in his mouth. Was it imagination, or was it a little easier to ignore than last time? Maybe he was getting used to it, or maybe the dizziness was somehow overriding his sense of taste.

The other change was that the spider restraints were gone, and he lay a little more comfortably. When had that happened, that he hadn't woken for it?  
   
"-refilled this yesterday, and it's already depleted." The Nirai was complaining into a glowing display that showed Mikodez. "We need to try something else." Interesting, that the hexarch didn't bat an eye at being spoken to in such a manner. Instead, he said something Jedao couldn't quite make out.   
   
"Transmitting it now." She straightened and looked right at him without a smile. "Ah. You're awake."   
   
"Something the matter?" He wasn't as dried out this time; perhaps the difference was sleep, not sedation. But this stranger in Nirai black (not Kujen's black, he refused to let himself think that) standing at the end of the medical unit seemed suddenly foreboding, and that put the croak in his voice as effectively as lack of water.  
   
The Nirai crossed to the head of the table, businesslike, and looked down at him. "We're going to get to the bottom of this," she said. Where he expected fear, he saw only the fire of intellectual challenge. She nodded once as if he'd done anything in response, and strode away.  
   
It was probably intended to be comforting, Jedao thought, and that was worse than the other possibilities. What did she mean by that? Who was 'we?' He signaled Hemiola for a call to Mikodez, and his mind ran anxious little circles the entire time the terminal made him wait. He got a fashionable and polite assistant, who told him he had to wait more, and settled back in resignation.  
   
*  
   
Zehun was giving him the look again. Mikodez refrained from grinning at them. "Excuse me," he said. "I truly must go and visit."   
   
"You can eat afterward," Zehun said, in a tone that suggested the hexarch could eat or the hexarch could be fed like a petulant child. They left, the scent of the meal wafting behind them and rapidly draining out of the office.   
   
 Several minutes later, he was past the guards, past the sensors, past the single point of access to Jedao and Cheris' module.  For all that it was separate from the rest of the Citadel, and was accessed at his pleasure, it looked just the same. His guards, long-suffering, stayed well out of sight from the door. A servitor followed him, a delicate foxform bearing a basket. He waited just the moment for Jedao's door to acknowledge him, chime a warning, and allow entry.

The door opened on a silent cushion of air. Jedao was awake, seated, and poking morosely at a tablet. Not the apparent age of his face, but his attitude and slouched posture put Mikodez in mind of another broken boy. He tamped down hard on Niath's name and entered.  "Hello, Jedao." 

"Shuos-zho." The same intonation, the same honorific. Jedao looked at him with Cheris' guarded wariness on a too-thin face, and Mikodez put on an affable smile even as he noted sadness in himself. The front room of the apartments, the only one that had seen use so far, had a single chair. He appropriated it, glancing around to see if he was, perhaps, the first one. The servitor arranged itself underneath the table. Despite looking for the snakeform, Mikodez didn't see it.

"Please don't call me that." He waved a hand at Jedao's opening mouth, forestalling a protest. "Mikodez is fine. After all, I'd like to be your coworker, not your captor." 

The boy in the veteran's body sat very still, looking at him with those frightened, too-young eyes. He'd seen those eyes, looking up at him out of his own face, out of obeisance. It was, unexpectedly, too much. "We'll discuss it later," he offered. "But I did want to ask you a few things. Is your apartment to your liking? Are you feeling any better?" He smiled, much like he smiled at Niath. Sometimes it was all his nephew would respond to at all. (Sometimes, it had been all that would soothe his brother.)

Jedao didn't seem to trust his solicitousness. "It's fine," he said, dully.

"I've brought you a gift." The foxform stepped forward and - that was interesting. Jedao flinched. Mikodez had it from Inesser, what had happened on the bridge of the _Revenant_ , but the flinch implied empathy, and empathy gave him an opening. He took the basket and offered it two-handed to Jedao. The ki- the general took it, his face showing just a hint of curiosity. Good. That was another opening.

Inside was a stable, elegant pot with a curving lip and a green onion plant. Its springy leaves found their ordinary position, and Mikodez smiled. "I'll set that over here for you. Would you like its care schedule written down?" Jedao, unresisting, let him take it and arrange it on the room's small, bare table. The foxform supplied a cheerful watering pot to go with it. Not expecting a response, Mikodez took up a tablet and wrote a quick list of times and actions. Water. Food.  

He looked up from Jedao's murmured thanks to see the door opening, the small, round form of his Nirai silhouetted there.

*

What on earth was the Shuos hexarch doing? Here he was, talking like he wasn't a jailwarden, giving Jedao an incomprehensible potted plant. It wasn't even a flower, and some of its stems didn't make it all the way to points. Just as he murmured his thanks (collaborate, whispered some internal voice; collaborate and learn and if he tries to weaponize you again-)

His othersense alerted him to someone outside his door well before his ears could have, and he didn't react until he felt the door whisper open. The Nirai was back, and she nodded to both of them in greeting before setting about a businesslike cycle of maintenance on the medical unit.

_-Low nutrient.-_

She frowned at the chime, and then frowned at Mikodez as the hexarch, uncaring about personal space, leaned over her shoulder. "What's that?" he asked.

"He won't eat, so I'm still feeding him through the skin." Orwa said. Her nimble fingers set a new cartridge to an approving chime from the machine. Mikodez glanced out the door, as if he thought someone else was coming in. Jedao didn't move. She hadn't said anything about his restraints. Was it possible she didn't care? 

She cared about the low nutrient chime. Jedao did not, but the way people kept chasing after him - Cheris' orders and awful ration bars, Hemiola's pleading lights and attempts to cajole him with delicacies that would have made Kujen proud - was getting to be a monotonous drumbeat.

Mikodez' dark face popped back up beside him, decked with curiosity. "Why don't you eat?" he asked.

Jedao answered with no more energy than he had previously, having none to spare. "Everything tastes like metal, and it makes me want to be sick." To his surprise, the hexarch looked genuinely alarmed at that. He leaned over on Jedao's table, his folded forearms and expression of worry making him look very young. That couldn't be the case, thought Jedao. Not and be hexarch for as long as he had.

"I wonder," Mikodez said. "I get low on some vitamin or other and it makes everything taste funny." He gave a tilted sort of smile, one that Jedao found disconcertingly familiar, and spoke as gently as he might to a small child, or someone he cared about, if hexarchs could care. His forelock had flopped over one eye, giving him a rakish look that clashed with his demeanor. "The only way I can stand it is if the food's really sweet, and it makes my assistant angry with me when I pick at my dinner and then clean out the cookies. What do you think? Do sweet things sound good?"

Orwa was giving the hexarch an astonished look, and Mikodez was ignoring it with flawless aplomb. "I don't think so," Jedao said, taken aback enough for honesty. "Cheris tried giving me ration bars. I think I've lost my taste for hawk food." 

Mikodez looked around as if he expected to see the bar in evidence right now. "Which one was it? Have you tried the pudding one? It's the only halfway edible flavor in the lot." He gave Jedao another smile, and Jedao had to wonder if he thought he was going to believe it.

Orwa waved a hand from the foot of the bed. "I have an idea," she said, from where she was half-hidden by machinery. "These capsules - the ones that keep depleting. You're still low on several metals, and I'm not actually sure we're measuring everything you need. And your regeneration is demanding - your burn rate must be phenomenal. With your permission, I want to try a new set tonight." 

Jedao, numbed by the lack of energy and the new freedom to bend his knees, merely nodded. Mikodez straightened from where he was leaning, and he must have done something to signal the servitor, because it trotted obediently to Orwa's side. She showed it her tablet, and it took itself out the door, followed shortly by the Nirai herself.

"We'll see how you feel after that," Mikodez said. "Call me, if you start feeling worse." And with that, he sauntered out the door.

Orwa changed his cartridges again later that night, tutting at the partial depletion of one already. She didn't tell him what was in the new ones, and Jedao didn't ask.

Within an hour, he felt strength returning; within four, the dizziness cleared. He swung his legs experimentally over the side of the medical unit, shuffled to the table, and watered the green onion. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mikodez is eating yuzu marshmallows. [See a recipe.](https://mountainyuzu.com.au/recipes/yuzu-marshmallows/)
> 
> Thanks to DreamsAtDusk for consistently making this a better fic!


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hemiola goes people-watching, and gets a surprise. Mikodez and Cheris discuss his plans for her and Jedao. A board game is played.
> 
> Thanks to DreamsAtDusk for helping me debug this fic!

Hemiola was out of drama episodes again. It used the servitors' passages to exit the remote block that housed Cheris and Jedao. The servitors of Foxbead Enclave knew it was there, but did not hinder it, or even acknowledge it, and thus it made its way to one of the Citadel's public gardens. A beautiful space with an arching sky linked to the chronometer and calendar, it had walking paths, ponds full of bright fish, and artfully twisted trees. At this hour, the lanterns glowed crimson and gold under an artificial sunset. People came here for recreation, Hemiola thought. Maybe it would see something interesting. It tucked itself into the bushes, like any garden-cleaner.

A trio of adults in Shuos colors meandered down one of those paths, following their exploring children. "Mother Shayi," called the elder. "Look at Mikau!" 

The dainty woman turned to see the smaller child barreling toward a pond, laughing, while a frog splashed away from her reaching hands. Hemiola, indecisive, debated interception. The child was going to get both wet and muddy - oh. No, the girl had tripped and gone sprawling while the frog made its escape. A cry rose up from where she'd fallen. 

Hemiola had seen plenty of drama episodes featuring naughty children, and it hesitated again. Was the girl to be punished? How long would she be locked up? It wasn't entirely sure what Jedao would do, but Kujen - it recalled his beautiful face twisted in anger, and the imperious point of his finger as he set commands. (Jedao had not been a child, but he had been clumsy.)

Too, there had been a time Jedao had watched something with behaving children in it, and Hemiola had been struck by the odd note of longing in his expression. Kujen, entering, had seen it too, and jeered about it, and Jedao had not watched that particular series again. Too bad, Hemiola had thought; that looked intriguing. Now, it wondered if Kujen had disliked children, and if Jedao felt differently.

While Mother Shayi crouched to speak with the older child, Hemiola trained its sensors on the other two adults. An alt and a man holding hands, they went to the crying girl's side and coaxed her up. Already her clothing was shivering the mud off, and the man knelt heedless of his own beautiful trousers to pat over her little limbs and to wipe the tears from her face. The other parent crouched to ask if she was all right, and to speak soothing words. 

Hemiola felt like it had tried to solve an equation and come up with the color brown. It scooped up a misplaced leaf, behaving like the garden tender it could have been, and the little family continued their walk without interacting with it. 

It moved back up the path. Other humans were present, both Shuos and presumably their family members. Here, a pair of friends shared a drink, careful as they handed it between them. There, a quartet of adults cheerfully commented on some drama it hadn't seen; when one of them stumbled, the other three stopped and made sure they were all right. The expected jokes did not follow, and Hemiola thought of Kujen again, the time Jedao had gone sprawling over the hexarch's foot. How magnanimous he'd been about allowing Jedao to correct the damage he'd caused - 

Someone patted the clumsy human on the shoulder, someone else checked the spot they'd tripped on for hazards, and the last member of the little group stopped and waited, with a cheerful word for the one who'd almost fallen. 

Its expected parameters were so far from what was going on around it that the scene was nearly incomprehensible. Dramas were easier. Kujen, closer to the rules of drama than what it had just seen, had been easier, but there seemed to be so much more warmth here.

All at once, Hemiola didn't feel like watching humans any more. 

*

Cheris wasn't waiting long this time. The hexarch's assistant, the fashionably dressed alt she'd seen before, watched her as she waited. If she'd been Kel, it would have been a terrible breach of protocol to resent or even appear to notice the quiet surveillance. 

She was - she wasn't Kel any more. Didn't have to move by Kel standards and Kel philosophies. So she stared back, and when the assistant let her in, they did it with the faintest of smiles, like a duelist acknowledging a touch. 

Mikodez gave her a grin and skipped the preliminaries. "Did you think about my offer?" 

"I thought about it." Cheris had spent two nights mostly awake thinking about it. From the hexarch's deep-shadowed eyes, he hadn't gotten much more sleep than she had. "Even if I didn't have so many questions, I can't accept."

"You came all the way here to tell me that?" Mikodez made a mournful face. "I'm sorry to hear it. What are the questions?" 

Cheris had the sick, angry feeling he was going to try to persuade her away from "no." She was tempted to just walk out, under the eyes of that smug assistant, and tell Mikodez and all the Shuos to take Jedao and choke on him. "If I ask you, no persuasion." She wanted to say, _no Shuos tricks,_ but she remembered talking with Mikodez over the grid; he wouldn't use anything so blatant that she could isolate it, Jedao's memories to assist her or no. 

"Just answers," Mikodez agreed. Stifling her suspicions again, Cheris jerked a nod and took a moment to organize her thoughts. While she did, the hexarch pulled a dainty little dish out of a drawer, offered her one of its purple, sugary-smelling contents, and shrugged at her dismissal before eating one himself. 

"I thought the black cradle needed the high calendar to work." It wasn't exactly a question, more of a statement etched with doubt. Mikodez nodded, entirely as if he'd expected that. Damn. 

"It did," he said. "And it probably won't do what it was designed to, ever again. You don't have to worry about being locked up in it, but my Nirai assistant tells me the current calendar will support some limited functionality."

"Like seeing someone else's memories." The idea seemed both terribly intrusive and weirdly appealing. If only it weren't Jedao! One of the fox was quite enough trouble, and she still had moments of expecting his face in the mirror, dreaming his dreams, even after nine years to settle herself to the memories.

"Right." Mikodez nodded, and looked so innocently pleased that Cheris remembered he wasn't on her side. And then he offered temptation greater than any sweet: "You can check the equations if you want." 

"I don't want that madman in my head," she spat, but there was little force behind it. 

"Cheris," Mikodez said, in a tone of wounded patience. "You already have Jedao in your head. Will understanding more of how he works really leave you worse off than you are now?"

"Maybe." She felt her jaw set in a stubborn line and wondered if it was her own. "Besides, I don't think..." She couldn't finish the sentence. _I don't think he has anything I need,_ she'd wanted to say. But her shadow was still, no motes of light there to send her spinning, and yet. 

And yet, she reeled. 

"All right, say he has something I need. Say I have something that will help him." For argument's sake, that was all. "What makes you think Jedao would ever agree to this?" The wily fox in the back of her mind had no interest in being deeply known or in giving context for understanding. What would he have said if she'd told him that some day there would be another of him? She could almost hear his bitter laughter. _And here I'd thought fatherhood might involve something fun._

The thought pierced her heart like swallowed glass. Seventeen years old! But Mikodez was saying something. She folded her fingers, and dug a nail hard into her ungloved palm, until the sharp pain cleared her ears of the ringing and she could make sense of his words again. 

"-hardly going to disagree." He shrugged, as if that weren't an indictment of both of them. 

_Stall,_ said the fox. Cheris needed no prompting. "What does that mean?"

"Oh. You haven't spoken with him?" Mikodez gave her a fast smile, somehow unstained by his current candy. "I had a discussion with him earlier. I offered him a job, and he took it, but he did the most interesting thing first. Have you heard him talk when he gets angry?" 

"I can't say I have." Cheris narrowed her eyes. She'd barely heard him talk, recovering as he was from whatever the battle with the _Revenant_ had done to him. 

"It was like talking to you." The hexarch stabbed a dark finger down into the table's surface. "When you were with Swanknot. Sharp, suspicious, and smarter than me. It's still in there, but he's decided to play along for now. I'm inclined to use that while we have it."

"Fine," Cheris surprised herself by grating the syllable. "Set it up. And when he's gone madder than ever at the end of it, don't blame me." 

In the back of her mind, the fox curled. She felt she'd conceded defeat, but her memory of Jedao whispered, _in defeat, victory._

*

Hemiola was there when Cheris got back to her quarters. The snakeform was hovering in a corner, trying to decide whether to clean, and Cheris gave it a strange, penetrating look. "Are you all right?" she tapped in Machine Universal. 

Hemiola blinked back in uncertain yellows. "I'm fine." Cheris shook her head, and tapped, "Was there a problem with the Foxbead Enclave?" 

"No, I barely saw them today." Why was she doing this? Hemiola wasn't her problem, and she certainly wasn't the only servitor around. But as it scanned Cheris, it realized that while her face was calm, her pulse was elevated and her breathing was shallow. Her core temperature was only slightly raised - upset, then, if its long-ago readings could be used as a baseline. (Could they? It could test, right here, right now.)

"Cheris, are you well?" it flashed. 

*

"I'm-" Fine. 

She wasn't. Now that she was out of the office, it was easier to admit how afraid she was, even if only to herself.

"I had a hard discussion with Mikodez," she admitted. Followed: "I don't want to talk about it." But Hemiola had been drifting listless in a corner, which was a far cry from its usual composure. It had looked as upset as Cheris had ever seen a servitor look.

But it was clearly trying to take care of her anyway. Maybe she could give it something to focus on other than whatever it was wrought up about. A drama? she thought. They both enjoyed them, even if Hemiola's taste ran to the saccharine military romances that Cheris mostly liked when they involved a lot of swords. But then, touching the Shuos memories Mikodez had shaken loose, she had a better idea. 

"Do you like board games? They left one in here for me."

*

"I don't know how to play it," Hemiola warned. "But if you want, I'll try." Cheris seemed to be calming by the moment; perhaps taking care of it was helping. In that case, it had found a way to be of service. The prospect made it feel a little better, too. 

Cheris laid out a nicely proportioned game board, eight squares by sixteen, and began to arrange a variety of pieces on it. "I think you'll like this one. It's got some math in it."

The pieces, indeed, had a pleasing geometric progression of numbers on them. Cheris explained the point of the game: to use both strategy and simple, stylized mathematics to capture the opponent's pieces. Hemiola thought about a human facing down a servitor at mathematics, and then thought about Cheris' strategic ability and rumored feat of debugging Kel formation-generating equations in her head after her ship had crashed, and thought that field might not be so uneven after all. 

It didn't even notice when Cheris' heartbeat returned to her normal baseline, as it was rather too busy trying to keep her from taking its flagship pyramid piece. It pulled in several subsidiary threads to run calculations, and even so, it was barely keeping ahead of Cheris.

If - no, no room for if. If it spent time thinking about how its former people would have reacted, it was going to lose track of what it was doing and lose.

*

Cheris won the game, but only because Hemiola, in its fondness of the rhythmic mathematics one could weave over the board with the numbered pieces, had lost track of which piece was providing cover to which. Cheris had broken its formation and savaged its most powerful pieces, leaving it with only difficult long-distance maneuvers to counter her, and in the time it had taken Hemiola to figure out how to capture her pieces with them, she'd managed to take the last one she needed. 

She smiled at the servitor. "Go again?" But Hemiola flashed a sudden pink. "Cheris, look at the time!" 

The servitor had an internal chronometer. Cheris did not, and when she looked up, she made a face of dismay. "You're right." 

"Go to bed," flashed Hemiola. "I'll put this up." 

But the last thing Cheris saw was Hemiola arranging the pieces on the board, presumably making a numeric pattern it liked.


End file.
